high value prisoner
by izziehuett
Summary: A lot of people thought this day would never come: Special Circumstances has finally captured David, the legendary resistance leader. Notes: follows canon until Specials, deviates thereafter.


high-value prisoner

summary: We always hurt the ones we love. Tally finally chooses between love and loyalty.

bonus: Tally and David sex!

notes: Follows canon until early in Specials, deviates thereafter.

Aisha was the night warden at Special Circumstances' holding facility. She had nearly a year's service put in since her specialization. Of course, like everyone, she'd wanted to be a Cutter. But she hadn't made the team. With the Diego War won, Special Circumstances could afford to be selective. They didn't need as many elite teenage warriors as they once had. Still, they trusted her enough for an important duty tonight: guarding the single top-security cell, the eight-by-eight one with a double-gated portal, like an airlock, as an extra measure against escapes. Tonight it held a high-value prisoner. The highest ever.

Earlier today, a band of Cutters had captured the leader of the resistance.

David was a legend. He had escaped Special Circumstances at the fall of the Old Smoke, escaped the Cutters during the Diego War. But it was true what people said: luck always runs out. Aisha, who hadn't been on duty when they'd brought him in, had peered at the surveillance feed time and again. It was black-and-white and only medium quality. She could clearly see his ugly face, rough, curly hair and handmade leather clothes, but she couldn't make out the famous scar that people talked about. She hoped to see him up close before they - well, nobody knew yet what Chief Youngblood was going to do with him.

A light blinked on her console and Aisha straightened, nervously. They were here. Chief Youngblood and her second-in-command.

The door slid back to reveal two figures who were a bright-and-dark mirror of each other. Both were 5'11; specialization surgery had evened out their heights to that standard. But Tally was fair-skinned, with silvery-blue eyes and light hair that she wore in tiny crimped waves, which was said to be a nod to her old ugly days, when her hair was kinky. Shay was olive-skinned, with long dark hair and luminous coppery eyes. As leader of the Cutters, she'd kept her intimidating flash tattoos, but Tally had hers removed. She'd also had her wolfish teeth filed down into a more normal appearance. That was understandable. She wasn't a mere Cutter anymore. She couldn't run all of Special Circumstances while scaring the crap out of mere civilians. Both women wore form-fitting suits of deep graphite color, and boots with grippy soles, perfect for the hoverboard races they still had, late at night, like the crazy Uglyville rebels they'd once been. They'd also re-created the Rusty sport of surfing, like hoverboarding on water. They didn't care what Special Circumstances veterans, the middle-pretty-aged ones, thought about their antics. They didn't have to. They, like David, were legends. They'd started, fought and won the Diego War when they were still teenagers. Saved the world from a descent back into Rusty chaos and environmental disaster. Saved the Prettytime.

Afterward, Tally had staged a coup and overthrown her creator/mentor/nemesis, Dr. Cable, and seized control of Special Circumstances. She had the Cutters behind her, even Shay, who'd as often been her enemy as her friend. The only person who'd seriously challenged Tally, Maxamilla Feaster, was now on long-term assignment in Antarctica, studying the limitations of hover technology so close to the earth's magnetic pole.

Everybody got the point. Nobody crossed Tally Youngblood. She ran everything now.

"Good evening," Aisha said respectfully, and they nodded to her.

"How have things gone?" Tally asked her.

"Uneventfully," Aisha said. "He's made no attempt to damage his cell or, uh, himself." She paused. "He's spent all his time sitting on the floor. He's ignoring the bed."

Tally and Shay exchanged looks. Shay said, "We expected that. We gave him the softest mattress we could find." At Aisha's puzzled look, she explained: "He was raised in the wild. He's more comfortable on the ground than on a mattress of deep synthetic foam."

"Very clever," Aisha said, and then groaned inwardly. She'd just complimented _Shay_, the leader of the Cutters, on her trickiness. She was going to end up in Antarctica with Feaster.

"Can we see the feed?" Tally asked.

Relieved at the change of subject, Aisha brought up the cell's security camera on the main screen. Both women leaned in.

David was sitting on the floor, head tipped back against the wall, eyes closed.

"There he is," Shay said, softly. "Your old boyfriend."

"Yours, too, remember?"

They were silent a moment.

Then Shay said, "No last-minute regrets?"

"The surgery's set for 8 a.m. tomorrow," Tally responded. "Enver's our best surgeon. He'll come through it fine."

Shay nodded. Tally turned to Aisha, said, "Carry on," and the two of them left.

So that was all, Aisha thought. They were going to make him a bubblehead like everyone else. She looked at the security screen again. Well, he'd be better off for it. He really was ugly.

**ii**

David sat with his head tipped back against the wall, imagining trees. Imagining running water. Imagining the sky. It was what was keeping him from going insane. In his entire life, he'd never gone longer than eight hours without seeing the sky. Now he was in a windowless cell. Indefinitely.

He'd never really believed this day was coming. He'd always told the other Smokies that it could, wanted them to be prepared to go forward without him. Yet he'd never really felt like he could be captured. He'd escaped too many times: at the raid that destroyed the Old Smoke, in Diego, in a dozen or so mid-air skirmishes with Specials.

Now, in just twelve hours, he'd learned something about himself he should have realized before this: he found it extremely unpleasant to be in a small, windowless place. He'd never before had the experience of being able to leave his somewhere if he wanted to.

His discomfort was almost entirely emotional, not physical, because the rough conditions he'd been living with all his life had prepared him for the treatment he'd gotten at the hands of Special Circumstances. Only his shoulders were sore. Nothing in wilderness living prepared you for seven hours in handcuffs.

The lead Cutter, Peris, seemed to have a special resentment. Who knew where that had come from? David hadn't been able to ask. After they'd handcuffed him, they'd gagged him as well, with a narrow leather strap. It seemed that they thought his ideas were so dangerous he couldn't be allowed to even to talk to his captors. Or possibly Peris just wanted to humiliate him. David had felt like an animal on display, being hauled from the wilderness to the zoo. He'd kept his eyes downcast and maintained total silence as they'd pushed him around, from transport shuttle to elevator to holding cell, finally to here, where they'd taken off the restraints and given him food and water. There'd been no interrogation yet. Was that still to come?

Maybe it wasn't coming at all. He had to accept the possibility that they were simply going to kill him.

It would be nice to see Tally and Shay again before he died, to say goodbye. Tally, especially.

He was not yet 24 years old.

**iii**

Tally did not sleep when she returned to her quarters.

She and Shay had adjoining compartments, high above the glittering, modern, peaceful world they'd saved together. Shay's friendship, uncomplicated by the jealousy and rivalry that had so often troubled them, soothed the loneliness of running the Pretty world without the comfort of surgically-induced brain damage, the kind that made you cheerfully unaware of all the world's potential dangers and troubles.

There was cutting, of course: Shay's innovation. Tally had struggled with her need to do it, especially after the terrible Diego War. She'd paid a high price for victory: her lover Zane, only recently specialized, had been killed in the fighting. Afterward, Tally had struggled to find an outlet great enough for her rage. She'd overthrown Dr. Cable and exiled her; she'd led the Cutters in mercilessly chasing the scattered New Smokies and Diegan rebels until they were all underground, powerless, cut off from each other and the cities they'd been about to infiltrate and liberate.

But after that, Tally had slowly pulled herself back from the brink of antisocial breakdown. She knew that things had changed. If she were to run everything, she couldn't turn into some megalomaniac Rusty dictator. Hoverboarding helped, as did surfing. So did knowing that she and Shay and a handful of Cutters had saved the world from a descent back into Rusty-era ways and environmental destruction. Diego was scorched earth, the Smokies scattered, many arrested. It had been bothersome that David had escaped yet again, but what could he do, really? He was just one man, one smart freethinker with a hoverboard.

And now, even that problem had been resolved.

Tally slid open her medicine chest and took out a small vial. She spilled a white crystalline powder onto the marble counter of her bathroom, leaned down, and sniffed sharply. Micronized, crystallized serotonin. Tally smiled to think of the days in New Pretty Town when she and Shay had thought champagne just the _bubbliest thing ever_, no pun intended. Now, neither of them would touch the stuff. No kind of alcohol, for that matter. Dizzy-making, mind-clouding, nauseating in larger quantities: she couldn't believe it had stayed popular for so long. They were still drinking it in New Pretty Town. Bubbleheads.

She went into the kitchen and turned on her hot-water heater. The tea she'd needed had been difficult to obtain and would have to be brewed from scratch; the wall didn't just knock the stuff out. She never drank it. Bitter stuff, bringing back bad memories of being an ugly and a smokey, lying to Maddy and Az and David in their living room. In the home her actions would soon destroy, with the family that soon never be a whole family again.

Just then the serotonin started to kick in, wiping those feelings away.

Tally turned off her skintenna - Shay was likely asleep, but just in case - poured the tea into a thermos, tucked a few sugar cubes into her wrist pack, and left her apartment.

**iv**

The warden was mildly surprised to see her a second time that night, Tally could see that, then the girl recovered herself and reported, "He's still calm. Enver came by to observe him for a while."

Enver was a psychiatrist as well as a surgeon.

The warden continued, "He says that taking away those handmade leather clothes and replacing them with regular machine-made ones would be helpful. The clothes are a powerful marker of identity, and that -"

"I understand the rationale," Tally interrupted.

"Sorry, Chief Youngblood." The young woman would have blushed if her special physiology was capable of it.

Tally smiled, to put the girl at ease. She wasn't a Cutter, just a regular Special. Imagine that, Tally reflected, thinking of any of the Specials as 'regular.' On her first trip to Special Circumstances, Tally had thought that they were all cruel, wolflike demigods.

"I'd like the surveillance camera turned off while I'm in there," she said. "He's no threat to me, and I'll need some privacy while talking to him."

"Of course."

The door hissed open, and Tally stepped inside the airlock. The door slid shut immediately behind her.

They said David had a flash tattoo now, though just on his chest, not immediately visible. David with a flash tattoo; who would have thought it? Of course, he'd been in Diego, where anything was available. At least, it had been back then.

Not anymore.

Tally wouldn't need the flash tattoo to tell her what he was feeling. Her highly-sensitive nose would smell a rise in adrenalin, or in cortisol - the stress hormones. She would be able to smell his fear, as Shay had once said to her, back when Shay was newly Special and Tally was not.

And David would probably deny he was afraid, like Tally had with Shay. At least, Tally hoped so. She expected no less of him.

She stepped forward, to where the biometric lock waited for her thumbprint.

**v**

The door opened with a soft hiss, and David opened his eyes. His heart caught in his throat. He'd thought himself ready for anything. He was wrong.

Since she'd left the Old Smoke, Tally had never looked the same twice. He didn't remember her being so tall - 5'11, Shay's height. The facial tattoos that had made her look like a warrior woman were gone, drawing more attention to the long, sharp bones of her face. She looked down at him with pale-blue eyes, like moonlight on water. It was possibly the killing gaze of a hunting housecat; he could not tell at all what she was thinking. He knew his flash tattoo was spinning. But he made his voice sound calm as he said, "I've been expecting you."

"Really? You shouldn't have," she said. The door slid shut behind her. "We don't need any information. All we need is you in a cell. This is the end of the Smoke, David. They'll fall apart without you."

"I'm not that important," he said.

She shook her head, and her hair moved with it like individual threads of superfine spun glass. "Don't be modest," she said. "I won't believe that ruse: 'There's another leader and she's still out there.'"

Curiosity tickled him, despite his fear, and he said, "She? Why do you assume the other leader would be female?"

"History," Tally said. "All the big players in this struggle have been female. Shay ran away to the Smoke. Dr. Cable sent me after her. I tried to switch sides, but betrayed the Smoke. Your mother invented the cure. Shay became Special and forced me into specialization along with her. See? All women. Except for you. You've always been the exception. Do you know what a natural pretty is?"

David shook his head, not following the change in subject.

"Someone who's born pretty, instead of needing the operation. The buildings in New Pretty Town are named for them. You're like a natural Special. You've never needed an operation to make you an extraordinary leader and a formidable opponent."

He didn't know what to say to that, and so said nothing.

"How have you been, David?" There was real softness in her voice.

"I've been," he said, shrugging. "Our lives are a war, Tally. You know what it's like."

"Yes," she said. "You're afraid right now, too. Would you like something to help you with that?"

"Something chemical, like a drug? No," he said.

"Tea, then," she said, kneeling down on the floor next to him, then settling into a sitting position. "It's the kind your parents used to drink in the Old Smoke. I thought it might help you ..." she paused to think of the right word, "-adjust."

"You think I'm going to adjust?"

She ceded the point by not answering. Instead, she moved to pour him a cup. He shook his head, no.

"It's not drugged," Tally said. "Really, it's not. If I wanted to have you sedated, there are half a dozen subtler ways I could do that. I wouldn't have to get you to drink something."

"Except that you've always enjoyed being tricky," he pointed out.

Tally gave up this point, too, by screwing the cup back onto the thermos. "Do you want to talk about what comes next?" she asked him.

David nodded, hoping he didn't look too eager. He did want to know. It was a small form of control, the only one open to him.

"The good news," Tally said, "is that you won't be tortured. Or martyred."

"Because that might make the resistance pull together and survive," he said.

"Yes."

"So it's surgery, then."

"Yes," she said. "It won't hurt."

"And afterward, I'll be your pretty, stupid, obedient companion?"

"No," Tally said, shaking her head. "I won't take advantage of you after the operation." She paused. "Are you still attracted to me? Don't answer; I know you are. Under the scent of your fear are those of testosterone and oxytocin, chemicals associated with mating and pairbonding."

His voice was bitter. "Isn't that what the operation is all about? Making you sexually appealing to males like me?"

"It is," Tally said, unoffended. "The thing is, if you had Special senses, you'd recognize the same hormones rising from my skin. You've never had an operation, and you don't need one. I was drawn to you as an Ugly, and I still am."

"But you had someone else."

"Zane?" she said. "Second best."

He was surprised to feel, despite everything, pleasure rise inside him at her words.

Tally said, "What about you? How many Smokey girls were there?"

"None," he admitted. "I was lonely, but they all looked at me like I was God's younger brother, and I didn't want adoration, not after everything I'd screwed up."

"You didn't screw up," she said, and her voice was tender.

"I hurt Shay. I lost you."

She laughed, ruefully. "Shay and I helped with that. We all made mistakes."

Suddenly, it was like they weren't in a cell anymore. He wasn't ugly, she wasn't Special. It felt like the night they'd spent talking under the moon, in the wild, just before Special Circumstances arrived and everything went so wrong.

"Tally," he began, and hope made his flash tattoo speed up, "maybe-"

Sadness softened her features. "Don't misunderstand me," she said. "I have a limited capability for - whatever noble emotions you're attributing to me right now. The girl you remember from the Old Smoke is gone. I only came here tonight to ask you for something. And to give you something."

He waited.

She prompted him further: "A thing we never gave each other."

"You want to make love? Here?"

"Yes."

"But you said we'll never do that after my surgery. Why even bother to do it just once?"

"Because," she said, pain sharpening her features, "because I won't be able to bear giving you up otherwise."

She was in a cell, too. Not just literally and for this moment. He understood that for the first time.

He reached for her, and Tally pulled him close, so hard and so quickly he was almost frightened at what he might have unleashed. Her arms snaked around his back just under the shoulder blades, finding their way under the leather and flax clothing to touch skin. He shivered.

"Not the mattress," he said, when she tried to pull him toward it. "The floor."

"Don't let me - I don't want to hurt you."

"Hurt me?"

"I'm Special. My strength, my body mods ..."

He kissed her and she was quiet.

She was on top, of course. They were both too desperate to go slow. She had already pulled off his weathered clothing to reveal old scars and the new tattoo - the illustrations his life in the wild and then later in Diego. When he peeled her bodysuit off, though, her skin was unmarked and flawless. This, too, was a signature: that of the city-state that had ruled her life, remade her in its blank image.

When she finally put him inside her and began to ride, he thought his mind was breaking. He couldn't form a complete thought, just, _Don't, don't stop, please I want, Tally, just you, Tally, no one else, no one else ever_ and then he came.

It should have happened in the forest, where his cry would have been right and the surrounding treetops would have absorbed it and given it context, like they did with all the other cries and howls of nature. Here it was all wrong, but he couldn't hold back.

He remembered the security camera, too late, but Tally reassured him. "I told her to turn it off," she said, and lay her upper body bonelessly against his.

They were still a long moment.

"Tally," he said, "this should have happened in the wild. You know that, don't you? If you hadn't been tricked, if the Smoke hadn't fallen, this would have happened in a meadow, a long time back."

"But it didn't," she said, sadly.

She sat up, drew away from him. He felt suddenly cold without her warm weight on him.

She ran a hand through her moonlight hair. "David, there's something else I need to tell you. About tomorrow."

The first chill of apprehension crept back over him, replacing the automatic, autonomic relaxation that sex had brought about. "What is it?" he said.

She didn't answer directly. "You said earlier that making you a martyr is the worst thing possible for the government. So let me ask you this: what kind of David would serve the government's purposes best?"

"I don't think it's in my interest to answer that. If I even knew, which I'm not sure I do."

Tally answered for him. "The best version of you is one that gave up the fight willingly. Sold out."

"For what, a handsome face? No Smokies are going to believe I'd do that."

"Not for a handsome face. For love."

"I do love you. But it wouldn't make me give up the Resistance."

"You still don't understand," Tally said, sadly. "I still love you, too. But so does Shay, or thinks she does, which may be the same thing at its core. She didn't run away to the Smoke to be free, she ran away for you. If she hadn't done that, I wouldn't have been manipulated into following, and the old Smoke might never have fallen." She let that sink in. "It's possible Dr. Cable would have found another runaway to scam, and the fall of the old Smoke was inevitable. We'll never know. The thing is, Shay's feelings for you - and the fact that they went unrequited - caused a lot of damage. Even after we were both pretty, what she perceived as my betrayal colored everything else she did afterward. Becoming a Cutter. Becoming Special. Making me Special. Our friendship is like a weapon that's all blade and no handle. It's been impossible for us to share it without cutting ourselves and each other."

David said, "You've grown up. The old Tally never talked like this."

"I always felt these things. I could never put them into words quite like this," Tally corrected. "The thing is, Shay and I are friends for now, but once again, I've moved ahead of her. I run everything now. Chief Youngblood."

Wasn't that inevitable? David thought, but did not say.

"But I need her," Tally went on. "She's my lieutenant, my most trusted. If someday she's unhappy again, she starts to resent me again - it's not just two people's feelings who are at stake. She and I are responsible for protecting the world."

David snorted. "Or squelching independence and free thought."

"You and I never going to agree on that," Tally said, unoffended. "I'm not here to have that old debate with you. The other thing is, Shay has legitimate grievances with me. I've wronged her in the past."

"You and I didn't do anything wrong," David said. "I didn't owe it to her to fall in love with her, just because she had with me. You didn't owe her -"

"I get that," Tally interrupted. "But I didn't support her in running away to the Smoke in the first place. I didn't tell Dr. Cable to go to hell when she asked me to find Shay and betray her. I didn't choose her to climb up to the top of Valentino Tower with me." Tally shrugged. "Some people would say, 'that's in the past'. But I want Shay to be happy."

"I don't understand what this has to do with tomorrow."

"It's about the surgery."

"What does Shay's happiness have to do with ..." He broke off. A terrible idea was dawning on him. "Oh, God. You don't mean- No."

"Don't be afraid. Follow your thoughts."

"No." He pulled away, shaking his head. "No surgery can do that. You can't make me love Shay."

Tally said, "Our doctors have made advances since the days when they were just creating lesions that just made people stupid and happy," she said. "We can change your memories now. You won't need much adjustment. You'll still remember being born in the wild, growing up to be a resistance leader. Most of what makes you David will be preserved. But you'll think you came to the city to be with the woman you loved and lost. Shay. It was me you'll remember as interfering, always getting between the two of you."

"That'll never work."

"You'd be surprised. Some of the happiest days of my life, mine and Shay's, were in the early days when I was first pretty. We were best friends, no secrets between us. If I could go back to those days, I think I would." She moved closer, took his hand. "This is a good thing, David. Shay doesn't want you to be made pretty, or stupid. She wants your face, your scar, your mind, your self. Except in love with her."

"It's wrong. Totally immoral."

"But it'll feel real to you. You'll be happy."

"Does Shay know you're going to do this?"

"She does. I've lied to her enough."

"The whole thing is going to be a lie." He looked away, unwilling to meet her eyes any longer. She withdrew her hand from his, gathered up her bodysuit and began to dress.

"Tally," David said, trying again, "I've never begged for anything in my life, but I am now. Don't change me."

She looked down at him and spoke kindly. "This is the last time you'll ever beg for anything. In 48 hours, you'll be more content than you've been in many years. I promise. You and Shay both. The only one who'll be unhappy is me."

Then David understood that all was lost. For her, this was like cutting: it was a penance. She justified it to herself by knowing that it was her who would ache afterward, not him, not her friend. That made it noble.

There was no arguing with that.

He closed his eyes and tipped his head back against the wall, the position he'd been in when she'd arrived.

"You won't remember this," she said, "but I'll always love you."

The door slid open, then shut.

She left the tea, and he eventually drank some. If it were drugged, so much the better, he thought. But when an hour passed, and the dull ache of dread and regret in his chest hadn't lightened at all, and he still felt fully conscious and aware of what was going to happen to him tomorrow, he was forced to conclude that she hadn't been tricking him.

Finally David crawled onto the mattress he hated, turned his face to the wall, and wept. He grieved for the end of his life as a real person with his own nature and his own memories.

**one month later**

It was a little after midnight. Shay was curled on her side in her bed, with David behind her, still partially erect and pressing against her after their lovemaking.

"That was amazing," he said into her ear.

"I know."

David often wanted sex after the late-night hoverboard races that he, Tally and Shay had around the high towers of Special Circumstances headquarters. The three of them had been getting along so well since David's operation, hoverboarding and surfing together, staying up late into the night talking and laughing, trying to teach the wall to fabricate the kind of rough cuisine - wild game and greens and homemade breads - that David missed from his youth, despite the fantastic array of international delicacies now available to him.

Now, David said, "You know what I was just thinking about? Tally."

Only another Special, which David was not, could have felt the infinitesimal tensing of Shay's core muscles. Her voice was very, very neutral as she said, "What about Tally?"

She had relaxed about a week after David's surgery, when it became clear to her that David's eyes never followed Tally when she was in the room, that he never looked troubled by a vague, nagging memory. Before that, and before the surgery, she hadn't really dared to hope. Shay remembered how she and Tally had both thought their way out of being pretty-minded, neither of them using Maddy's cure. Of course, Enver had assured her that the new methods were much more thorough. Irreversible. In the weeks since David's surgery, she'd finally come to believe it. Had she been wrong?

_What about Tally?_

David said, "Do you think she's still in love with me? And that's why she hasn't found someone else?"

Shay hesitated. "I think she's disciplined," she said. "She's Chief Youngblood, married to the job. We shouldn't worry about her."

"I'm not," David said. "I just think ... that guy dying, the one she really loved, it must have been harder than we realized. I wish she could be happy, you know? Like we are."

Shay relaxed, just as imperceptibly as she'd tensed. "I know."

After a few moments of companionable, easy silence, David spoke again. "You know what else I'm thinking?"

"What?"

"That this should have happened in the wild. You know that, don't you? If Tally hadn't been tricked, if the Smoke hadn't fallen, this would have happened in a meadow, a long time back."

Shay smiled, and she reached a hand backward to caress his ribcage and hip. "I know, baby," she said. "I know it would have."


End file.
